Our intial instinct of where to
look for 24V Li-Poly batteries was to
look in the same place we found our
NiCads a decade ago — with power
tools. We headed over to our local
home improvement store to check
out the cordless drills, and were
surprised to find that 24V Li-Poly
packs (and 24V NiCad packs, for that
matter) were as scarce as open times
for a dinner reservation on
Valentine’s Day.

On the way to the next store, we
had the bright idea of doing an
Internet search for 24V Li-Poly
batteries. To our relief they did
indeed exist, but the funny thing we
noticed is that pretty much every
single search result was referring to a
24V Li-Poly battery for a cordless
weedwhacker.

Since gardening tools are usually
in a section separate from hand tools
(like cordless drills), we had not even
noticed any weedwhackers on our
first visit. At the next store, we made
a beeline straight to the lawn tools
section, and lo and behold we found
a 24V Li-Poly pack bundled with a
neon green Ryobi weedwhacker. It
just so happened the weedwhacker
was on sale.

We picked up two of them
because each weedwhacker gave us
a battery pack and a charger (and a
weedwhacker with a hefty motor —
future bot parts, perhaps?). We think
this goes to show that you should
always be on the lookout for robot
parts because they turn up in
unexpected places (like the garden
department).

The next step was to open up
the battery packs to see if the task of
attaching a connector to the battery
leads would be as easy as it was with
the NiCad packs. After taking out a
few screws, we were ready to pop
the top off of the plastic battery
casing when we were greeted by the
somewhat unexpected sight of a very
busy printed circuit board. This was in
stark contrast to the inside of the
NiCad packs which were pretty much
limited to the battery contacts and
leads.

Removing the plastic top also
exposed the battery contacts which
were long metal tabs. Given the Li-

Poly tendency to explode when DISSECTING THE WEEDWHACKER.
PAGING DR.FRANKENSTEIN.